Black Bells: Megan Falls Down the Rabbit Hole

An hour later, Megan stared at a blank screen and wept silently.

She couldn’t do it. She’d lost the knack. She’d tried over and over again to conjure Jack Benimble in her mind and make him do what she wanted, but she’d failed. Every sentence she’d written was stiff, clumsy, and fake. It felt gross to her, like mental necrophilia.

God, what happened to me? How did I turn out this way, so dull and fake?

Jack was gone forever, and so was her daughter. Megan was powerless. She had to face facts: she wasn’t eight years old anymore, hiding in her closet with a sketch pad and a flashlight.

Wait a minute. She stopped herself. Maybe that was what she was doing wrong.

Megan shut down the computer. When she’d been eight, personal computers were still years into the future. Her family hadn’t even owned one until she was sixteen, and she’d been forbidden to touch it without direct supervision. Of course she wasn’t going to get back down the rabbit hole with this sleek, modern machine.

Megan had no sketch paper or printing paper, but she did have an enormous stack of ditto sheets shoved into the drawer beneath the computer—school work that the girls had brought home. Most of the sheets were one-sided: a terrible waste of paper in Megan’s opinion, but a blessing this time. She riffled through the stack and in two minutes had two dozen sheets of drawing paper.

The girls’ art supplies were in a drawer in Jenna’s bedroom. When Megan went back there, Jenna had all the farm animals standing in a circle around the barn. It looked like a bizarre druidic ritual. Megan shivered a little. “What are they doing?” she asked her daughter.

“Watching.”

“Watching for what?”

“Watching for Professor Chicken to come tell them what to do.”

“I see.” Megan wondered if this was a good opening to try and get more information out of her, but then she shook her head. She was too damn tired, and anyway, it felt like she’d gotten as much out of Jenna as she was ever going to. The paper in her hands was already starting to talk to her, and she felt that familiar itch on the back of her neck, right at the base of her skull. She wanted to write; she felt the need in a way she hadn’t when she was staring at the blank, soulless screen of the computer.

She found a box of the basic ten colors that looked fairly intact. That’s all she would need. She had always stuck to bold, simple colors when she was telling her stories to Debbie, and she needed to re-create that same energy now.

Back to her bedroom, and straight to the walk-in closet she and Brian shared. For once, she was grateful for Brian’s childlike addiction to clutter. The dropped clothes and scattered CD-ROM disks made it feel more cozy, more like a child’s closet. But it was still missing something.

Of course. Megan pulled the rosy-pink comforter off the bed and dragged it into the closet. She kicked, pushed, and pummeled the comforter into something resembling a squirrel’s nest. Then she gathered up her paper and crayons, found an old coffee table book she could use as a lap desk, and settled in.

There was nothing soulless or blank about the paper in her hands. Rather, it was pure potential, like the sort of quantum universes that astrophysicists talked about. There might be an elephant, a planet, or an undiscovered species here. It could be anything at all.

Start with Jack, Megan thought.

She drew Jack Benimble as he had been in the coffee shop: bright motley, with black bells. Why the black bells? Was that some sort of clue, a bit of symbolism, or nothing at all?

Never mind. Just draw. Megan was amused to observe that her drawing skills with crayons hadn’t improved much since she was eight. They felt stumpy and thick in her hands, and she resisted the urge to clutch them in her fist like a toddler. She felt flustered and clumsy, but that was all right. Getting back into a childlike mindset would be easier than she thought.

On the next page, she wrote in ragged longhand, “Once upon a time there lived two girls and their friend Jack. Jack made magic happen, and he made them feel good when things at home were sad and scarey.”

“Scarey.” Megan started to correct the typo, but she changed her mind. That was the sort of mistake a child would make.

The crayon felt warm under her hand as she continued. “One little girl was tall and pretty, and the other little girl was shorter and smarter. They loved each other very much, and they loved their good friend Jack.”

Oh, she felt it now; how could she have forgotten this feeling? The warmth spreading through her brain, like a river of molten gold. It felt like dreaming, but it was alive and conscious and real. When was the last time she’d written anything? Before or after she’d gotten custody of her girls?

Megan was suddenly angry with herself for neglecting this wonderful gift for so long. She drew the two little girls: one tall and gawky like herself, the other short and chubby like Debbie. They had identical brown hair and hazel-green eyes. Around them she drew brown shapes that could be dogs or bears. She decided that they were dogs.

“One day the girls asked Jack to take them to the Island of Dogs, where all dogs could run free and not be on leashes or get put to sleep because nobody wanted them. So he jingled his magic bells, and they were taken away through the sky to a beautiful island full of wonderful dogs. The dogs were happy to see them, and they licked their faces with pink tongues.”

The crayon was hot in her hand, but Megan’s hand clamped down and wouldn’t let go. It hurt, but in a good way. She went on. “But then one day an evil wizard came to the islands, and all the dogs ran away to hide. The evil wizard laughed and laughed…”

The crayon in her hand was so hot that Megan thought it might melt. But it stayed strong, and the words poured out of her hand.

It’s back! she exulted. I can feel it! I remember now, I remember how to do this!

Why did I ever stop?

Along with the pleasure, though, Megan felt a trace of fear. Of what she didn’t know. She felt apprehensive, as though something had happened or might happen, or maybe she just thought it could happen—Megan didn’t know this either. But she ignored the fear in favor of the delight she took in her story. One dog was grey and had a pointed snout and blue eyes. Megan shivered when she looked at the blue blobs of its eyes. Faintly, she heard a snarl. That wasn’t a friendly dog, she felt. That was not a dog who would run from the evil wizard.

There was a black smudge in the middle of the paper. Megan frowned and touched it, and the smudge expanded to cover the entire paper. It felt cold. She touched it again, and her hand disappeared. Megan yelped and pulled her hand back, but the world was tilting, tipping her forward, and Megan fell through the black smudge that was no smudge at all, but a hole, and Megan fell. She fell through the hole in the paper.